During an earnings conference call on Tuesday, May 5th, Disney cheif executive Bob Iger assured that its recent acquisition of %30 of Hulu, which, among other things, will lead to Disney’s putting its ABC television content on the popular streaming site, will not cannibalize its TV audience. And he’s right: enabling the streaming of content only opens the door for a new demographic to consume your content.
The television watching mindset is is necessarily removed from the streaming mindset. There is a class of people who know that Lost is on ABC whenever it’s on, and those people who care schedule their time such that they watch Lost during the broadcast. Then there is an entire class of people who can’t be bothered with that. I will use myself as an example here. Myself and fellow TG author Alex Wilhelm love ABC’s show Castle, which we have been watching fo the past few weeks, and at that, we usually watch it on Tuesday. But we have no idea when it airs or when it comes online. We just watch it whenever it is convenient. Thus ABC is able to capitalize on people who otherwise would never bother with television.
The streaming crowd is by no means small. Chances are that many of you reading this article are avid users of Hulu or Revision3 or something else of the sort. You guys are the ones who are going to take advantage of Disney content on Hulu. And that lets Disney, little by little, put more cash into its wallet.
